We brought him to the vet with his sister Stubby. Ex-rays showed he had some type of foreign body in his stomach, but it didn’t look like an obstruction. This is the first time ever that we actually saw something in an ex-ray of a dogs’ stomach. Normally an ex-ray is taken and then we hear, “we’ll the ex-ray is inconclusive.” This time we saw the little chunks of whatever just hanging out in his stomach. The vet surmised that it was either pieces of bone or plastic. The doc also noted arthritis in his back.

She gave him a shot of buprenorphine for pain and recommended tramadol if he appeared painful in the upcoming days. She also gave us Cerenia (I’ve never heard of this before), which is an anti-nausea drug for dogs. We switched his food temporarily to Hills w/d and are giving him some canned pumpkin with his canned food.

He showed immediate improvement the next day, however, he still seems a little glum. With 11 dogs living inside, it’s difficult to determine who’s poop is who’s (no– they don’t poop in the house, we have a dog door and they poop outside, usually); and we haven’t identified any foreign objects in any poop, so we aren’t sure if whatever is in his tummy has actually passed.

Stubby also visited the vet. Stubby has been randomly yelping and we can’t figure out where the pain is coming from. The vet couldn’t figure it out either and recommended we continue to give her rimadyl and not take her on walks. She thought it was possible neck pain. The morning after her vet visit, Stubby woke up in a lot of pain and jumped on the bed where she tensed her entire body and shook for a couple of minutes. We’ll give her another week and if she’s still exhibiting the same symptoms we’ll bring her back in. Stinkypup diagnosis is she has an abscess we can’t see, or she’s having arthritic pain.

Update June 10 (Greg): He’s feeling better. Maybe it was all a ploy to get canned food for a week. There was no sign of what was stuck in his gut.

Links about FCE:

• Fibrocartilaginous Embolism
• Fibrocartilaginous Embolism

Levi has moved inside. Hopefully this will be permanent. He seems to have taken residence up on our bed and on Dudley’s bed. Poor Dudley was wandering around last night because he didn’t have a bed to sleep on. We told Levi that he can’t sleep in Dudley’s bed.

Roo is healing nicely; she too is inside. Last Sunday Greg noticed a huge infection in her groin area…not really her groin, but I don’t know what the name for the area is. The infection was nasty, but superficial (hopefully). She’ll be inside until it heals. Due to the location of the wound, she didn’t get stitches. We’re treating it like an open wound; keeping it clean and applying ointment. Hopefully Roo will be well enough to run a 100 mile race in March.

Now for the bad news. Stub-a-dub has a lame hind leg. We’re not sure what happened, but she can’t use it at all. we spent a few hours at the vet today and the prognosis is inconclusive. Either she had trauma to the leg and has some muscle and nerve damage, or she’s had trauma (or something else) to her spinal cord and it’s affecting her leg. We’re keeping her inside and she’s on some meds. I guess we’ll know more tomorrow…if muscle atrophy has set in it’s bad news.

Besides all of our sick and injured and retired dogs, we haven’t been out that much this week due to -40 temps. It warmed up tonight (-20), so Greg took 11 dogs for a run and I took the retirees in the yard for a 4 mile run.

Greg has been having fun at -40. He’s been throwing boiling cups of H20 into the air to see what happens—the water evaporates, but it looks like it explodes. Oh, and for the longest time we thought that after around -25 it was too cold to snow. In all our years of winter camping at sub-arctic temperatures it has NEVER snowed, that is, until yesterday—it snowed at -40.